Enlightenment Articles

Enlightenment Articles

Enlightenment articles by Dr. Robert Puff, a respected psychologist and meditation teacher, shares his insights on enlightenment derived from his thirty years of personal experience meditating. These articles can help you to make sense out of your new perceptions of life.

When I was in graduate school working on my PhD, I remember I was taking a course in child psychotherapy. On the first day of class, the professor stood up and said, “We are always going to have child abuse throughout the world. Always, so what are we going to do?”…….

As we explore the world of enlightenment together, one of the key components of the journey is: What is the ultimate reality of what is? Here, we are really getting back to what is, what truly has always been and always will be. In our pursuit for this, we are looking at identifying what is permanent….

As we journey towards the path of enlightenment, what can we expect from our lives? What can we expect to happen inside of us? What is going to happen? In truth, there is nothing that we must do. Life just unfolds and we are merely the witness to that unfolding……

When I was about 12 years old, I really wanted a minibike for my birthday. It just had one gear and went about 15 to 20 miles per hour. But I knew that if I got this minibike I’d be the happiest boy around. When I finally got it, I rode it all over the place. I especially rode it in my backyard. Round and round I rode, and I was in heaven. I thought “Life is so wonderful.” For a little while, it was…..

Our minds love to label things. From a very young age we start airing our opinions, such as by saying, “We like this,” “We don’t like that,” “That’s ugly,” “That’s beautiful,” or “That’s disgusting!”…..

In many ways, it’s very simple but it can be extremely difficult to do. When we’re around the age of two or three, we start identifying with things. For instance, we like and dislike certain things, we realize who our parents and grandparents are, we take on a name, we take on a personality…..

We need to become aware of the fact that we are, and everything comes out of who we are. All there is, is beingness. Silent awareness, things that can’t be described but what we are, and everything, is not two, non-dual, isness…..

One of the most important tools that can help us enter the world of enlightenment is deep questioning about everything. If Albert Einstein had not questioned the laws of gravity he never would have discovered the special and general theory of relativity, which basically describes that gravity isn’t what Newton described as an apple falling to the ground but rather it is a curvature of space-time….

As human beings, we can suffer so much. Yes, there are joys in this life, but often with joys come pain. We just go back and forth between the thrills or excitements and then the suffering and pain that follow these highs. It’s as though with a high comes a low…..

What is perhaps the most important thing we can do to wake up and discover who we are is to ask ourselves “Who are we?” But is it knowledge and having the right information that enable us to wake up? Is it having a secret mantra so that we know who we are? Is it having a mystical experience so wonderful that it awakens us to the truth and reality of who we are?…..

Desires cause us suffering and don’t work because anything that we choose as a desire is based on that which isn’t permanent. That which isn’t permanent leads to discontentment. Even though the desires may be fulfilled, later we’re going to seek new ones again. We’ll want something else and this endless cycle of desire and satisfaction, desire and satisfaction doesn’t work because we’re seeking that which is impermanent…..

Let us explore why self-identification causes bondage and how we can be free of it by identifying who we truly are.

I don’t know if you ever saw it but there was a movie once made starring Arnold Schwarzenegger called Total Recall. A large part of the movie revolved around the character discovering who he really was…..

Though I was born here in the United States my relatives from my mother’s side and some of my father’s relatives came from Holland. I think because of my ancestry I’ve always been attracted to Dutch painters. One of my favorite painters in the world is Rembrandt. One of the things that Rembrandt loved to paint pictures of himself…….

Let us take a good look at the question of who we are. What is equally as important is to know who we are not. As humans, we have an incredibly strong tendency to identify circumstances and ourselves with labels…..

To solve any problem, we first have to go to its source, the ultimate source of ourselves to discover who we are. Our minds can think of two possibilities: we’re being or we’re non-being. But, because the mind is part of this enquiry, it is limited. It is incapable of going beyond itself and yet who we are is beyond the question of being versus non-being……

As we journey through life we spend a lot of our time in the pursuit of things which we believe will bring us happiness, joy and peace of mind. For example, when I was at Princeton working on my Masters degree, I had a friend who was really in love with a woman and he felt that if he got her to marry him, he would be in a state of eternal bliss and happiness….

Who are we before anything else ever was? Who are we permanently at our core? When we take everything that is impermanent away, who are we? When we begin to remove things that we often consider to be the ultimate, we are left with God. However, although God may be the ultimate, our concepts of God are not…..

Life is a dance between two intense emotions: fear and desire. We go back and forth between these two throughout our lives. But what we’re exploring here is what precedes and pervades life before desire and fear…..

Some questions we need to ask ourselves when finding out who we are and how to live in the world in an enlightened way include: “What are the various states of being in which we exist?” and “What ultimately is our true, primordial, foundational state of being?” ……

When we desire something, we first have to work for it. Often we find ourselves spending a large amount of mental energy thinking about it, wishing for it and wanting it to happen. But after working for it, we should let go and just be…..

When we think about our lives, the people in our lives, the work we go to, the city we live in, the galaxy we’re a part of and the whole universe, we think of it as so real, tangible, ever present and everlasting. But because we perceive it in our minds and we can only perceive that which our minds can grasp, it’s actually a very small universe…..

As we go through life, sometimes we have beautiful experiences. They are so wonderful that we are filled with a desire to hold onto them for as long as possible. But why we can’t hang onto them and why they go away is because we can only remember them in the mind….

Everything that is, everything that ever will be, everything that has ever been, can only occur because we are bearing witness to it. Everything exists simply because we are aware of it. Without us, nothing can be. The entire universe unfolds from our true self: our consciousness, which is also known as the ultimate self, or the ocean of awareness……

I began meditating almost thirty years ago. I think at first I began just out of curiosity. I had been studying meditation in my academic training and learned how science has shown that meditation is very beneficial to us…..

In this life, the most permanent thing we experience is witnessing awareness. It begins when we are born and it goes away when we die. But beyond this witnessing, beyond the most permanent thing that is part of our life, is that which truly is…….

What causes things to be the universe, us, everything that is? Time and space play a huge role in causation. Physics, Einstein and scientists around the world have concluded that we live in a space-time continuum…..

In life we experience two main emotions: one is pleasure, the other is pain. They come and they go; they are a normal part of the human experience. But what happens is that our minds try to maintain the good and push away the bad……

Knowledge is one of the things that prevent us from awakening. Why? We think we know many things and knowing these things keeps us from being awake. To gain awareness we need to unlearn what we know, or think we know…..

Ironically, one of the main things that keeps us from awakening to our true nature is knowledge. We think we know things, and knowing these things keeps us from being awake. Our belief that we have true knowledge keeps us caught up in our perceptions, labels, and opinions, making them appear as realities rather than the biased points of view they actually are……

Before anything can be known, before anything can come into existence, there must be someone who is the background to all that exists. When we wake up in the morning, everything blooms in our awareness……

The infinite reality of now is what life is really all about. In many ways, we have created a prison around ourselves. The walls are all those limiting ideas of who we are, who others are, and what life is. Practice neti neti: not this, not that……